Using the new Shortcuts in *os27 to move Dayone to Apple Journal

Software
1

I don’t have a million dollars, but if I did I would give some of it to anyone who can use the new shortcuts thingy to take 500 exported Day One entires and import them in Apple Journal with the correct date, time, and location.

I tried tinkering with it last night for a few minutes but couldn’t get anywhere.

2

I never run OS Betas so cannot help regards the new “provide prompt > get shortcut,” in xOS 27. However, I do use Shortcuts a lot. Even in iOS 26 there are Journal actions, so it “should,” be possible – looking at the action step – to carry over from Day One, the Title, Creation Date, entry content.

However, the location info looks a bit more tricky. You don’t seem able to use a variable in the location parameter; only “Choose,” which lets you select a location. As a work around, you could – if the Day One export supports lat/long info (Edit: it does) – then use that to build a URL for either Google or Apple Maps, and then append that to the end of the Journal entry.

So just to recap, with a JSON export from Day One, I think you’d be able to get at least some of the way you are after by looping through that export and creating entries in Journal. Outside of that, I’m a bit stumped.

Hopefully others will chime on with a better solution.

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3

Does holding down on choose give you more options?

4

Nope. It doesn’t act like a standard placeholder for a variable.

5

I have no idea what format Apple Journal will import but I export markdown entries from Day One and import them into DEVONthink using a combination of Hazel and some AppleScript. The initial stages can be accomplished by Hazel alone. Export the entries from Day One as Plain Text/Markdown then use Hazel:

  1. to unarchive the resulting .zip file;
  2. to run the following shell script to split the file into individual journal entries, with each filename starting “out”:
cd journal
split -p '^	Date:' $1 out
  1. to rename all the out* files to out*.md.

That would leave you with a number of files called, e.g., outa.md, outb.md, outc.md, for the corresponding number of exported Day One diary entries. For me, Hazel then moves the files to the DEVONthink Inbox and AppleScript takes over for things like sensible renaming of each record (i.e., file), conversion of hashtags to tags, etc.

I appreciate that may well not sound very helpful at all: sorry! However, there may be something in the procedure that could help with what you’re trying to do.

Stephen